The Future of Carbon Neutral Design

We’re changing the way we think about energy use and greenhouse gas emissions

Atelier Ten is leading the design industry in developing an accurate methodology for predicting operational greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Building on our expertise in energy analysis we’ve created a process to make carbon-based recommendations at every stage of design.

We’ve always designed from first principles to reduce the amount of energy use on a project. And we’ve been getting smarter about when that energy is used. New availability in hourly GHG data have given us the opportunity to not only lead the industry in accuracy of GHG accounting for our projects, but also evaluate design options to go beyond net zero energy (NZE) towards true carbon neutrality.

As our buildings and our electric grids integrate increasing amounts of renewable energy, our projects must move beyond simply reducing annual energy demand – they must become nimble in response to a variable supply of renewable energy. We must consider when a building uses energy and how the grid uses that energy in the real world, so we can align our energy demand with renewable energy supply. We must determine the smartest ways to meet our buildings’ energy demand through on-site renewable energy production, short term and long-term energy storage and smart controls to manipulate time of use for energy resources both on- and off-site. To accomplish all this, we must understand each building’s operational carbon emissions in detail.

Our team is dedicated to making a positive change in low carbon design. We are sharing our carbon calculation methodology with the larger community of designers and energy analysts, in the hopes that our industry can quickly tackle the critical issue of operational carbon emissions.

Interested? Click the image below to read and download the full report.

You can also learn more about our collaborator, WattTime, here: https://www.watttime.org/